An Overview of BL Games

Published November 27, 2016

Here’s a (non-exhaustive, but pretty thorough list) of BL games that exist! I was going to write something about trends and whatnot but wanted to do at least some cursory fact checking to make sure I wasn’t just basing my observations on a skewed data set (i.e. only games I actually pay attention to), so I threw this together since VNDB and EGS are both shit when it comes to 女性向け titles (VNDB surprisingly had listings for almost all of these, but the way the tags are, pulling a list like this out of VNDB would have been awful). I already forgot what I was going to write about/got distracted by interesting things while putting the list together, so I’ll probably get to that later!

This is like 95% straight from Cool-B’s list of titles eligible for their BL Game Awards (I’d link the page but they took it down!). It’s not a perfect list. It does not feature literally every (Japanese produced) BL game ever produced, the coverage of doujin titles is quite spotty (ex. not listing Gakuen Handsome until the recent re-release is a bit deceptive if you want to look at this as a timeline of major releases), fandisks and console ports are included pretty haphazardly. A few gay (“bara”) titles also have fairly inconsistent inclusion here as well (There are definitely a couple in here, but they’re not consistently included. It might be a doujin/commercial distinction going on or it could be related to marketing classification, I’m not sure, Cool-B didn’t really share their criteria for inclusion). Cell phone games are also not included unless they got a (Japanese) PC port. That said, I think it’d be pretty fair to say this is a list of just about every significant Japanese BL game release (and then some).

I’ve gone ahead and added titles released since the last title listed on the original list (Omerta Code Tycoon) and announced, but not yet released titles to make it a bit more up-to-date. The inconsistent inclusion of doujin titles has also resulted in the pretty glaring absence of the Love&Destroy’s titles, so I went ahead and added those. I’ll probably go back and clean it up some more going forward (and have been considering adding some failed/never released projects, although that’d be more limited to my own knowledge of that sort of thing).

Anyway! I hope someone else finds this interesting/useful in some way. I think the little summary chart I threw together at the end (I really hope I didn’t miscount any of that, lol) illustrates just what a weird, tiny niche BL games are right now pretty well though.

Some Notes:

Activity status: Brands/developers are listed as Defunct, Active or Unknown. Defunct brands have not produced or announced a title in several years. Active brands are brands which have either released a game recently or have a new title in development. Brands listed as Unknown are of questionable status, they may have released a game somewhat recently, but have no new projects in development (that are public knowledge at least).

Some specifics: I have Fareast Blade listed as Unknown because Ouka Otsu‘s status has become a bit questionable as of late. It’s dropped out of Cool-B since Kusunoki Yashiki no Monogatari was announced, the official site hasn’t been updated in over a year and the development team has gone rather quiet on the subject of the game. The drama CD they announced over the summer never materialized either. (Perhaps they’re having trouble securing a publisher/funding?).

Pil/SLASH is also in the Unknown category since they appear to have gone mostly dormant since Pigeon Blood with no new titles announced and the main staff are working under PIL-VAMP now. They haven’t officially retired the brand or disbanded it or anything (not that most of the defunct brands do that either), so there might be hope of them returning some day.

The latest issue of Cool-B confirms that Pil/SLASH is back! They have a new game in the works called Paradise with Love&Destroy’s writer.

I also have MesuDanshi listed as Unknown since, well, to be frank most brands don’t make it past their first release and they have nothing else announced yet. The creative team sounds pretty optimistic though. Also, admittedly MesuDanshi is arguably not exactly a BL brand, but it seemed close enough to warrant listing.

Age rating classification: This is just pulled straight from the Cool-B chart. There are some weird ones though! Like you might notice a handful of titles listed as just “18+” and not “18+ Adult Only” those I believe are CERO Z rated titles rather than the PC game 18+ that isn’t regulated by a board like CERO.

Developer/Publisher/Brand listing: Again, this is pulled from what Cool-B listed titles as. I think their choices are a bit strange in the case of some console ports (crediting them to the port company, not the original devs), but I was too lazy to change it. Might do that later when I figure out a better way to list ports in general. Ports and this listing convention has inflated the game/active devs count per year in the summary table at the bottom a little bit depending on how you want to look at that.

Red: last year with a release for a brand (presumed/possibly defunct or no longer producing BL titles after this year’s releases)Green: first year a brand appears (if they died the same year they’re just red)Blue: port company (mostly)
*- Team Yokkyu Fuman should really be listed much earlier, but that’s where it shows up on this particular list

Some notes on companies & their relations

Note: this is not an exhaustive list or analysis of all brands mentioned in the list above. The notes are really just my observations, there’s a fair chance I’ve failed to notice some important and/or interesting things. Also the number of titles to a brand’s name is more of a ballpark number since it kinda depends on what you want to count (should ports/all ages versions count? what about content patches/add-ons? should I only count completed games or in-dev too? etc). Also this isn’t really in any particular order.

Alicesoft

Alice Blue

2000-2004

Defunct

Commercial

6 titles

Best known titles are probably Oujisama Lv. 1 and Ore no Shita de Agake. Many staff show up later at Pil/SLASH working on Masquerade and and Koibito Yuugi. Jinnai, who wrote Ore no Shita, went on to work with Tennenouji (scenario writer on Luckydog) and form otome brand Kalmia8.

Amuse Craft (parent brand of several other eroge brands including Unison Shift)

Platinum Label

2000-2006

Defunct

Commercial

5 titles (one series)

They made Sukisho! and that’s about it (not to suggest that it wasn’t a very successful/important series though). If the core creative staff went on to do other things in the industry, they did it under different handles.

Visual Art’s (parent brand of Key, etc)

Spray

2001-present

Active

Commercial

10 titles

One of the oldest still active BL game brands. Best known for the Gakuen Heaven series and Kichiku Megane. They went dormant for about five years after STEAL! but returned with a sequel to Gakuen Heaven (an unusual move in modern BL games as it was an all-ages only release) and a darker 18+ title, Tsuminaru. They produce pretty traditional style BL.

WillPlus (a huge umbrella brand encompassing a lot of companies)

Langmaor

2002-2006

Defunct

Commercial

4 titles

Shares some staff with Tennenouji (most notably Yura) and Amanatto. Probably best known for Enzai and Absolute Obedience.

Amanatto, Amanatto Parfait

2005-2007

Defunct

Commercial

3 titles

Blue Crescent Moon

2004

Defunct

Commercial

1 title

Hobibox (another big umbrella brand/distributor)

easy-peasy

2013

Defunct

Commercial

2 titles (one series)

Unfortunately seems to have been a failed experiment. Their only release was the two halves of Kamisama (Kari) which was notable for a couple things: one, it was a split release as was fashionable for some reason in 2013 (game split into two half-price thematic units released at the same time or in short succession, another Hobi brand, Pure-Wool, did this with Jooubachi no Oubou too) and two it had some interesting gameplay mechanics from being able to chose from two different age versions of the MC in each half of the game and having seme/uke options for every scene. I guess it failed to impress though.

Holicworks

LoveDelivery

2007-Present

Active

Commercial

6 titles

Their recent title Taisho Mebiusline has been a massive success. Has very close creative ties with its sister brands.

TYRANT

2014-Present

Active

Commercial

2 titles

Dunno what to say beyond Tokyo Onmyouji not being nearly as popular as Taisho Mebiusline.

hobibox/fetish

2016*

Active

Commercial

1 title (in development)

Hasn’t released anything yet, but they announced their first title, Fukushuu Teikoku, in 2016. The stated objective of the brand is to produce more sex-focused works. They hired noted male eromanga artist Kei Mizuryu to illustrate their first title.

Some general notes about Holicworks: I have to go look up the interview I vaguely recall reading this in again to double check this but I *believe* this entire sub-group under Hobi is helmed by a single producer who’s (a/the?) creative lead in LoveDelivery. LoveDelivery and TYRANT have a very close relationship though (iirc Tokyo Onmyouji and Mebiusline‘s stories are related?). Both LoveDelivery and TYRANT lean more traditional, while hobibox/fetish (seems to be at least) leaning more into the 男性向け-style side of things.

ClockUp (under Hobi through ~2014, now independent)

parade

2013-Present

Active

Commercial

2 titles

Probably the most noteworthy thing about parade in general is that, unlike most BL brands under 男性向け eroge companies, parade shares all of its staff with ClockUp. It’s not isolated from the rest of the company. The staff all do regular work with ClockUp as well. Why’s this noteworthy? Well, I think it’s a big contributing factor to parade’s somewhat unique approach to BL.

Astray

2016*

Active

Commercial

1 title (in development)

Not 100% confirmed that they’re under Hobi, but the HobiGirls Twitter account keeps RTing them, so it seems like a reasonable assumption.

Nitroplus

Nitro+CHiRAL

2005-Present

Active

Commercial

8 titles

It’s N+C, I don’t think they require much introduction. Togainu drastically changed the BL game landscape. One thing I would note is that I have serious doubts that Kabura Fuchii is a single person (at least not anymore). The presentation of staff starting around DMMd shifted pretty drastically from more in-depth, personal comments to broad and generic information from “staff” (not to mention the state of DMMd‘s script itself being highly suggestive of multiple writers (not that multiple writers is a bad thing, I just think “Kabura” is more of a marketing thing than an actual credit)––but that’s a subject for a different post!)

Orbit

CORE, CORE-DUSK

2001-2008

Defunct

Commercial

4 titles

Probably best known for game’s featuring Carnelian’s art.

Karin Entertainment (I think there has to be another company over them but I’m not sure what it is)

Karin Entertainment

2005-present

Active (not in BL)

Commercial

1 (BL) title

They haven’t done anything resembling BL since Animamundi, presumably shunted any of that off to the Chatnoir Omega sub-brand instead.

Karin Chatnoir Omega

2011-present

Active

Commercial

3 titles

Best known for the Omerta series and soon Omega Vampire. They are a more “traditional” brand of the current crop of active developers.

Cyc (technically the parent company is called something else but for simplicity)

Cyc Rosé

2003-2010

Defunct

Commercial

2 titles

Only ever produced Bara no Ki ni Bara no Hanasaku and its fandisk + ports. Matsuri Kusaka (who would later go on to write Shingakkou for Pil/SLASH) wrote and illustrated BaraKi.

Palmiers

2006-2014

Defunct

Commercial

1 title

Brand only released one title (and re-released it several times). Tamayura had a bunch of writers on it, including Akihiko Hanada (Hunks Workshop).

STONE HEADS (Pil, CODEPINK, etc)

Pil/SLASH, Pil/SLASH XXX

2006-2014

Active

Commercial

6 titles

Initially started out with a number of Alice Blue staff, but staff have cycled around several times since then (for example Shingakkou shares essentially no creative staff with Pigeon Blood). Their most famous and critically acclaimed work is Shingakkou by a long shot (Kusaka probably deserves more of the credit for that than P/S tbh). Pigeon Blood seems to have been a horrific production disaster on a lot of levels. They spun off the Pil/SLASH XXX brand explicitly for that release, meaning for it to be more “hardcore” sexual content, but initial plans for the title seem to have been scrapped (possibly related to whatever happened to cause the lead writer to drop out shortly before the game’s release and be replaced with several new writers + causing a lengthy delay). The remaining creative staff at P/S seem to have all moved on to their recently established sister otome game brand, Pil-VAMP, leaving P/S dormant or possibly abandoned. The brand’s future is extremely unclear at the moment.

Lune (nukige brand)

Mesu Danshi

2016

Unkown

Commercial

1 title

Officially, they consider themselves a 男性向け brand and don’t even consider their game(s) BL.

WoGa

Tennenouji

2000-present

Active

Doujin(ish?)

8 titles

Most famous for the Luckydog series which is perpetually the most popular game in Cool-B. The Luckydog series honestly confuses the shit out of me in terms of what releases are what, so I really don’t know what to make of it other than it’s very popular. Ties to Langmaor.

Odessa Project (they’re more of a distributor/publisher than parent brand afaik)

Mada Labo

2011-present

Active

Doujin(ish)

3 titles

Technically Mada Labo is the umbrella brand for Togo Mito’s projects with Mada Koubou being the actual imprint Hadaka Shitsuji was published under, but the distinction is pretty trivial considering he has no other brands at the moment. In 2013? A sub-brand called Claw/Mark was announced with a game, Tenrin no Guneval, but after years with no updates, it eventually evaporated in late 2015 or early 2016 I can’t quite recall.